Content Warning: This chapter contains graphic descriptions of death, bodily decay, and a decomposing corpse.
My girlfriend had been made of sunlight.
When she smiled, the corners of her eyes curved into crescents. The smallest joke could send her into helpless laughter.
She was a game developer.
She made games about cats curled up like loaves of bread, teddy-bear cafés waiting for customers, and brightly colored candies that burst with a cheerful pop whenever you matched them.
Everything she created came in warm pastel shades.
I loved her for that. I loved her more than anything.
"Look at his paws. Aren't they adorable?"
"Careful. He's a stray. He might scratch you."
"He won't. Look at him. He's a sweetheart, aren't you? Yes, you are."
She was the kind of woman who stopped to admire dandelions growing through cracks in the pavement. If a passing cat so much as looked at her, she would crouch down and spend the next five minutes introducing herself.
Her tiny apartment was always crowded with soft animal plushies, and the bed smelled faintly of peaches.
We had been together for three years.
Marriage seemed like the natural next step.
We met each other's parents. We booked a wedding venue. We signed the papers on an apartment we could barely afford and planned to move in the following year.
Happiness had been right there, close enough to touch.
That was before six months ago.
Before everything broke.
"What are you doing home?"
"I quit."
"You what?"
"I quit my job. I'm going to make the game I've always wanted to make." She looked around the apartment. "What are you doing here this early?"
"It's your birthday. I was going to surprise you."
"Oh. Right." She smiled. "Thank you."
I had taken the day off to set everything up.
She had quit without warning, without discussing it with me or anyone else. Part of me wanted to argue, but I let it go. She had talked for years about wanting to make something of her own.
Besides, it was her birthday.
"So what kind of game are you making?"
"I can't tell you yet."
"Not even a hint?"
"No." Her smile widened. "But you should be excited. I'm going to make something people will remember."
That night, we shared a cake, drank wine, made love, and fell asleep in each other's arms.
I had no idea anything was wrong.
She had seemed like herself.
Or perhaps I had only wanted to believe she was.
Even then, there had been something strange in her eyes. A feverish intensity, as though something had taken hold of her and was staring out through them.
Why hadn't I noticed?
Had I understood what I was seeing, could I have stopped her?
If I could return to that night, would anything have changed?
The mechanical keyboard clattered in the dark.
The sound was sharp and brittle, like bones knocking together.
For six months, it had filled the cramped studio apartment she used as both a home and an office.
Blackout curtains covered the windows, erasing the difference between morning and night. The room remained perpetually dark, lit only by the corpse-pale glow of two monitors.
I sat on the edge of the bed with a paring knife in my hand.
For one brief moment, an ugly thought passed through my mind.
I forced it away and began peeling the apple.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Clack-clack-clack.
The blade whispered through the skin between bursts of frantic typing.
My hands were clumsy, but I managed to shape the slices into little rabbits.
They had always been her favorite.
"Jisoo. Come eat something."
I set the plate beside a container of rice porridge from the convenience store and carried the tray to her desk.
Her back had become grotesquely thin.
Each vertebra showed through her shirt. She had lost so much weight that even sitting in the chair looked painful.
For six months, Jisoo had been slowly starving herself to death.
She had quit her job, severed contact with everyone who cared about her, and locked herself inside that room.
Every evening after work, I came to feed her. I made her swallow sleeping pills. I used my vacation days to bathe her when she could no longer be persuaded to bathe herself.
Without me, she would have starved.
Or collapsed from exhaustion.
Either way, I had spent six months forcing breath into someone determined to die.
The only reason Jisoo was still alive was because I refused to let her go.
"Look." I made my voice as cheerful as I could. "Rabbit apples."
She did not answer.
Her eyes remained fixed on the monitor. Only her fingers moved, twitching mechanically across the keys.
The world on the screen was hideous.
Six months earlier, it had been little more than a handful of sketches for a fairly conventional dark fantasy game.
Now it was a vision of hell.
A giant with iron spikes driven through its eyes. A bloated fish covered in dozens of staring pupils. A female knight flayed by whips and packed into a jar to ferment. A troll swinging its own intestines like a weapon.
The monsters born beneath Jisoo's hands screamed across the screen.
"Jisoo. Please."
I took hold of the chair and turned her toward me.
Her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets. Broken veins crawled across the whites. Her lips were split and crusted with blood.
She no longer looked human.
She looked like a skull with skin stretched over it.
"Just one bite. That's all I'm asking." I lifted a piece of apple on the fork. "Eat this, and then get some sleep. You haven't slept at all today."
She pressed her lips together and glared at me.
There was no affection in her face. No gratitude. No sign that she even recognized me.
She looked at me as if I were an insect crawling across something sacred.
The Jisoo I remembered could never have looked at anyone that way.
The expression hurt more than I could bear.
"Take it away."
Her voice, once soft and warm, had become as harsh as metal dragged across stone.
"No. I'm not doing that. You're going to die if this keeps up." I pushed the fork closer. "I won't stop you from working. Just eat one piece."
"I said take it away!"
She struck my hand.
The apple flew from the fork and rolled across the floor.
The little white rabbit came to rest in a nest of dust.
Something inside me snapped.
For six months, I had clung to the final threads of my patience.
Now they broke as easily as that apple had fallen.
"What happened to you?"
My voice shook.
"You weren't like this. You used to be happy. You used to laugh all the time." My throat tightened. "Why did you change? Did something happen at work? Did someone do something to you?"
"It has nothing to do with work."
"Then what is it?"
"I'm doing this because I want to."
Tears burned behind my eyes.
I had regretted that birthday a thousand times.
I should have stopped her the moment she came through the door and told me she had quit. I should have taken the computer away. Called her parents. Called a doctor.
Anything.
"What do I have to do to make you listen to me? I'm not telling you to abandon the game. I'm asking you to go outside once in a while. To shower. To eat. To sleep." My voice rose. "You have to do the bare minimum to stay alive!"
"Shut up."
"Jisoo—"
"Stop bothering me."
She turned back toward the mouse as though I had already ceased to exist.
"Enough!"
I reached beneath the desk for the power strip.
I had to stop her, even if I had to force her.
I would shut down the computer. Pull her away from the desk. Hold her until she finally looked at me again.
Until she remembered who I was.
"No!"
Her scream tore through the room.
Her hand moved with startling speed.
She seized the paring knife I had left beside the plate.
"Don't touch it!"
She swung.
The blade passed through my forearm with a soft, whispering sound.
For an instant, there was only cold.
Then blood sprayed across the desk and spattered over one of her drawings.
I stared at her.
She stood trembling, the bloody knife clutched in her hand.
Jisoo had never been able to kill so much as a spider. Whenever one appeared in her apartment, she trapped it beneath a paper cup and carried it outside.
Now she had cut me because I had tried to turn off her computer.
"I'll kill you," she whispered.
Her eyes were gone.
Not blind. Not empty.
Gone.
This isn't Jisoo.
Perhaps the woman I loved had died six months ago, and I had simply refused to notice.
"Put the knife down." I raised my uninjured hand. "Please. Just put it down."
"I'll kill you!"
She lifted the knife and rushed at me.
There was almost nothing left of her, yet she struck with enough force to drive me backward.
I lost my balance.
Instinct took over.
I shoved her away.
"Snap out of it!"
Her body had become so light that the push sent her flying.
She struck the desk.
The side of her head hit the corner with a dull, wet crack.
She made no sound.
Her body collapsed as if someone had cut her strings.
The knife slipped from her fingers and struck the floor.
Clink.
"Jisoo?"
I pressed my hand against the cut in my arm and stared at her.
She did not answer.
She did not move.
Dark blood began to seep from beneath her head.
The rabbit-shaped apple lay beside her, slowly turning red. Blood spread through the white dust on the floor, tracing branching patterns across the linoleum.
I stumbled backward, caught my leg on the chair, and fell.
My cheek struck the floor.
When I opened my eyes, I was facing her.
Her pupils were wide and unfocused.
As I stared into them, the room seemed to drift away.
"Jisoo?"
Nothing.
Then the thought came to me.
She might be dead.
Relief flooded through me so suddenly and completely that I almost laughed.
At last.
At last, the sound of that keyboard had stopped.
"Jisoo?"
I crawled toward her and held a finger beneath her nose.
No breath touched my skin.
Her eyes remained open.
I reached out to close them, but stopped.
They were empty, yet they seemed clearer than they had in months.
I could not bring myself to cover them.
"Are you finally going to sleep?" I whispered.
My voice broke.
"You must be exhausted. You haven't slept without pills in six months."
I did not call an ambulance.
I did not call the police.
Instead, I lifted her into my arms.
She was almost weightless. Her body sagged against me, yet it had already begun to stiffen.
Blood dripped from her hair as I carried her across the room.
I stepped through it, leaving red footprints behind me.
I laid her on the bed.
I undressed her and replaced her blood-soaked clothes with the soft pajamas we both loved.
The wound in her head stained the pillow red.
I decided it did not matter.
Nothing mattered anymore.
I lay down beside her and closed my eyes.
Time dissolved.
Night came. Morning followed. Then night returned.
I did not go to work.
I did not eat.
I lay in bed with Jisoo in my arms, as though we were lovers sleeping through a lazy weekend morning.
We had always been terrible at waking up.
Every morning used to be a battle.
After the first day, purple stains began to bloom across her skin.
Livor mortis.
That was the medical term.
To me, it looked as though she were blushing.
"Your makeup looks beautiful today."
I stroked her cold neck.
Her skin felt damp and heavy beneath my fingers, like wet clay.
Even that seemed beautiful.
By the second day, gas had begun to swell inside her abdomen.
Blood and foam leaked from the corner of her mouth.
I bent down and cleaned it away with my tongue.
It tasted salty and metallic.
"When was the last time we kissed?" I murmured. "Was it in Gangneung?"
I laughed softly and pressed my mouth against hers.
She did not turn away.
She did not shove me back.
Her tongue moved wherever I guided it, receiving me without protest.
For six months, she had rejected me.
Now she accepted everything.
By the third day, the smell filled the room.
Sweet.
Greasy.
Thick enough to taste.
The smell of decay turned my stomach, yet I breathed it in until my lungs were full.
Maggots appeared around her eyes and nostrils. They vanished into her and emerged again.
I watched them without disgust.
She did not smell like a corpse.
She smelled like fruit left to ripen in the heat.
Like the apple on the floor, growing sweeter because we had never eaten it.
"Jisoo. Time for dinner."
I picked up one of the rabbit apples.
It had browned and shriveled. Dust clung to its surface.
I pushed it between her pale, decomposing lips.
"Open up. You're not spitting it out this time."
Her jaw would not move.
I forced it apart.
There was a brittle crack as the stiffened joint gave way.
I placed the apple inside her mouth, covered her lips with mine, and pushed it toward her throat.
"Good, isn't it?" I whispered. "I made it for you."
I rubbed my cheek against hers.
Cold fluid smeared across my face.
Maggots crawled from her skin to mine.
I did not care.
We were together.
We were becoming one.
We were rotting together.
I lost track of how long we stayed that way.
We ate together. We watched movies. We drank wine. We made love again and again.
I was the only one who spoke, but that was all right.
I had always been the talkative one.
It felt like being back at university, when we had lived inside our dreams and needed nothing more than each other to be happy.
I did all the things she had once been too embarrassed to let me try.
For the first time in months, I was happy.
It did not last.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Someone pounded on the front door.
The sound came from another world.
From reality.
An intrusion.
I pulled the blanket over Jisoo's face.
No one else was allowed to see her naked.
She was mine.
"Police! Open the door!"
The word cut through my haze.
Police.
"If you do not open the door, we will force entry!"
A drill screamed against the lock.
Metal ground against metal.
I wrapped both arms around Jisoo's decaying body and held her so tightly I thought I might crush her.
No.
They could not have her.
She had finally come back to me.
She finally listened when I spoke.
Then the monitors lit up.
They had been black for days, sunk in sleep mode.
Now one of them flashed crimson.
Static hissed from the speakers.
Red letters appeared in the center of the screen, one after another, as though an unseen hand were typing them.
[ DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE? ]
I lifted my head.
Slowly, I crawled out of bed.
The stench of decay clung to my own skin now.
[ YOU KILLED GOD. ]
[ YOU DEFILED GOD. ]
[ YOU DESTROYED THE WORLD. ]
Each sentence seemed to drive itself into my chest.
At last, I understood.
"I killed Jisoo."
I had murdered my girlfriend.
I had defiled her body.
Of course.
She was the god of the world she had created.
I had killed her.
I had desired what remained of her.
I was a sinner.
The front door shuddered.
Voices spilled through the opening as the police forced their way inside.
"The smell—Jesus Christ!"
"There's a body on the bed!"
"Get him! Don't move!"
Their shouts reached me as if through deep water.
Only the monitor remained clear.
The message changed.
[ DO YOU SEEK ATONEMENT? ]
Atonement.
The word reached into me and took hold of whatever remained of my soul.
Jisoo was no longer here.
The thing on the bed was only flesh.
The real Jisoo was inside the screen.
Inside the world she had created.
Inside the hell she had loved.
"Hands where I can see them! Get on the floor!"
An officer rushed into the room with a Taser raised.
I must not have looked human to him.
I stood naked and skeletal, grinning through split lips, my body covered in blood, pus, and pieces of rotting flesh.
Not a man.
Something closer to a demon.
I smiled at them and reached toward the screen.
"You're in there, aren't you, Jisoo?"
"Take him down!"
"You are under arrest for murder and abuse of a corpse! You have the right to remain silent—"
"On your knees! Face down, now! Three, two—"
"I'm coming," I whispered. "I'm coming to you."
My fingertips touched the glass.
White light swallowed the room.
A shrill ringing tore through my skull, and the world overturned.
The officers' voices vanished.
The smell disappeared.
Even the sensation of my own body was stripped away.
I felt myself breaking apart.
Not my flesh.
My sins.
They dissolved into fragments and scattered across an endless sea of data.
Then I began to fall.
Down through darkness without bottom or end.
That was how I left reality behind.
I opened my eyes in the ruined world she had made.
In my hell.